A top down approach for MAS protocol descriptions

  • Authors:

  • Joaquín Peña;Rafael Corchuelo;José L. Arjona

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Seville, Avda. Reina Mercedes s/n, 41012 Seville, Spain;University of Seville, Avda. Reina Mercedes s/n, 41012 Seville, Spain;University of Seville, Avda. Reina Mercedes s/n, 41012 Seville, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Applied computing
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

When the protocol of a complex Multi-Agent System (MAS) needs to be developed, the top-down approach emphasises to start with abstract descriptions that should be refined incrementally until we achieve the detail level necessary to implement it. Unfortunately, there exist a semantic gap in protocol description methodologies because most of them first identify which tasks have to be performed, and then use low level descriptions such as sequences of messages to detail them. In this paper, we propose an approach to bridge this gap. We model MAS protocols using several abstract views of the tasks to be performed, and provide a systematic method to simplify them. Tasks are represented by means of interactions that may be refined into lower-level interactions with the techniques proposed in this paper (simpler interactions are easier to describe and implement using message passing.) Unfortunately, deadlocks may appear due to protocol design mistakes or due to the refinement process. Thus, we also propose an algorithm to ensure that protocols are deadlock free.